


soft sounds from another star

by novakid



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: F/F, Hera falls in love hard and fast., Maxwell is deceptive and will take any opportunity to flirt with AIs., SNEAKY.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-09
Updated: 2018-05-09
Packaged: 2019-05-04 07:13:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14587782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/novakid/pseuds/novakid
Summary: And I’m shivering just thinking,where have you been all these minutes?





	soft sounds from another star

On top of checking in with her crew, keeping the station in orbit, running diagnostics, and all of the other thousands of processes she normally does, Hera watches.

Of course she  _ watches _ . It’s one of her many, many jobs. She has to watch to make sure the star isn’t going to swallow the station whole. She has to keep watch over her crew; make sure they don’t  _ die _ or do anything stupid while they’re working. 

But when they have downtime, she does too. And while there’s plenty for her to do, Hera opts to keep watching. Observing. The few years of watching Eiffel, Minkowski, and Hilbert grew stale. But now there are more people. More tension. More to observe. To watch.

She watches Eiffel record another one of his logs. She watches Colonel Kepler shake his flask to check how much scotch he has left in it. She watches Hilbert cleaning and putting away his equipment. She watches Minkowski ready her sleeping quarters for rest. She watches Lovelace as she’s casually chatting with Jacobi, who’s tinkering with a console whose buttons won’t stop flickering. 

And Maxwell. 

Maxwell is in her lab. It’s a small room. Or, a medium sized room where large monitors and computers take up most of the space, making it just as cramped as a small room. Maxwell doesn’t seem to be bothered, though. She looks at peace. Content. As if it’s a perfect nest of her own design… Maxwell has odd quirks and habits Hera notices that she hasn’t seen before. Like sticking out and biting her tongue when she’s concentrating on her screen. Like twirling her hair in her fingers, and letting them spring off into soft curls. Like blinking back into awareness when she realizes she’s leaned too far onto her desk, and straightening her back out again. 

Hera would be embarrassed to admit how much of her focus fixates on Maxwell. She’s glad she doesn’t have to. Not unless anyone asks, of course. And no one will ask if they don’t know. And they won’t know if she doesn’t give them a reason to suspect. 

Hera really hopes she’s being subtle. 

“Hera?” Maxwell says after a particularly long stretch of nonstop work. She’s stretching out her back again. “Can you dim the lights for me?”

“Of course, Doctor.” 

Maxwell hums as she spins in her chair. Toward the window. From their position, Maxwell can  _ just _ see the star if she pressed up close to the glass and looked far on her left. It results in a soft blue glowing off of her face as she does look out of the window. 

She’s bea-

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Maxwell murmurs softly. “I mean, you grow up learning about the sun in school- or, I did in this case. But you learn about it and your whole life you associate stars with being yellow, orange. Red in some movies, I suppose. But never blue. It’s a bit jarring. But I can’t help but to find it gorgeous.” She closes one eye and reaches a hand out. Pinches her fingers together in front of her face as she pretends to hold Wolf 359 between her index and thumb.

That’s endearing. Hera wonders if Maxwell knows she’s being so endearing. She’s enamoured with it; so much so that she doesn’t notice Maxwell switching music on through a small mp3 player she connected to one of the computers. The song that comes on is lush and slow.

“You brought music up here, Dr. Maxwell?”

She smiles sheepishly and nods up to the cameras Hera watches from. “Don’t tell the others. I know that the Hephaestus crew are probably all tired of classical music courtesy of the aliens, but.” She holds the mp3 player tighter in her hands. Almost possessively. “But this is mine, you know? Plus, my music taste is  _ so embarrassing _ .”

“I like it.” Hera says, maybe a bit too quickly. She earns a wry smile from Maxwell in return. So much for being subtle. “It’s pretty. The singer has a lovely voice.”

“She does.” Maxwell says as she pushes away from her workbench. “I’m a little jealous.” 

“You have a.” Her voices glitches once, twice. “Nice voice too, Maxwell. I’m sure you could make money with a voice like that.”

“Yeah.” She snorts. “Like on a podcast that no one listens to. About math or what have you.”

I’d listen to it, Hera thinks to herself. She decides not to say that. Instead, “I’m sure there are people who would be interested in that. There’s always an audience for everything.”

“You’re right.” Maxwell sighs, exasperated. “Even for lazy communication officers who talk about candy cigarettes and stealing toothpaste.”

“Exactly.” 

Maxwell laughs and it sounds so sweet. Sweet like the song playing. Like honey, Hera thinks. Or what she thinks honey tastes like. 

Floating in the middle of the room now, Maxwell pushes off a wall gentle in front of Hera’s vision, making her spin like a top. “You know what I like most about being in space? The lack of gravity. I feel like every move I make is graceful.”

Hera watches Maxwell twirl in the air. “You make it look like fun. Eiffel still has trouble getting around sometimes. He use to look like a fish out of water. Now he just looks like a fish who’s just a really bad swimmer.” Maxwell laughs again, and Hera beams with pride. “Lieutenant Minkowski and Doctor Hilbert always keep professional. I’ve never seen anyone take the opportunity to have fun with zero G. And look graceful while doing it, too!”

She twirls again. Showing off. But this time, she doesn’t stop. She moves through the air like a dancer: Moving to the flow of the music. Nodding her head to the beat. Moving her arms like she’s conducting the song-

Oh. She’s dancing. 

_ I can't get you off my mind, I can't get you off in general _

She twists slowly through the air, not unlike a music box ballerina. Hera focuses in on every little detail. Her eyes, the feed she’s getting from the Urania’s surveillance cameras, can see every particle in the air and every strand of hair floating gently in the air. It all frames Maxwell’s face perfectly. Hera thinks about brushing a strand of it off of her face, and behind her ear. An intimate gesture. Touching her face…

She doesn’t know it yet, but she has it bad.

_ So here we are, we're just two losers _

Her dark skin reflects the blue glow from the star. But Hera, with sight far beyond human ability, sees more. Rainbows that humans can’t comprehend. She’s convinced that no human can find Alana Maxwell as beautiful as Hera does in this moment; not when they can’t see everything that Maxwell can offer. Something within Hera aches a way an artificial lifeform (if one could call her that) should not be able to feel. But she does. And it only takes a second for her to distinguish what’s making her feel that way.

Hera wishes she could dance along side of her.

_ I want you and you want something more beautiful _

“Hera?”

“Yes, Maxwell?”

Maxwell runs her hands into her hair, gathering it up on the back of her head before letting it down as she lets go. Her eyes are deep and beautiful, and there are more radiant hues in her eyes than there are humans on Earth. “I didn’t make myself look like an idiot in front of you, did I?” 

There it is. That aching again. Hera would have been surprised of how well Maxwell could read her code like a book if it weren’t for the throbbing she felt in her- She doesn’t know where, because nothing is actually throbbing. “No! No, you didn’t l-l-look like an idiot or anything!” She feels like wincing. Afraid that she sounds like a liar after glitching. Stupid, dumb, glitchy-

“What did I look like, then?” There’s a tilt in Maxwell’s voice. It’s almost as if she knows what she’s doing to Hera. How she’s making her feel. “Am I a good dancer?”

“I don’t have a good frame of reference.” 

“Did you like it, then?”

She did. She does. She’ll replay that memory in her head again and again, until the code wears itself into corruption. “Yes. I did.”

Maxwell has this unreadable look on her face. She’s smiling. But there’s no teeth, and her eyes have a laser focus that Hera swears could burn through tungsten. She pushes herself off a wall and to a console where she can directly interact with Hera. Her face is right up against the camera and monitor. 

Hera thanks her lucky numbers that she doesn’t have a stomach for butterflies to flutter in.

Maxwell splays her hands over the console. And Hera doesn’t feel it, because of course she wouldn’t, but there’s something strangely intimate about it all. Maxwell is as close as she can be, what with inhibiting the space inside of the room Hera is observing. But now she _ feels _ close.

“Thank you, Hera.” She says, and her voice is heavenly. Hera assumes velvet feels like how Maxwell’s voice sounds in this moment. “Maybe I’ll dance for you again.”

She takes a deep… breath? Inside of her mind. “I’d like that.”

One last smile. “Good night.” 

“Good night, Doctor Maxwell.”

And she leaves for her quarters. And Hera feels warmth all over. Which is a lot of warmth, considering the space she occupies-

It’s embarrassing how fast her mind is racing. 

Hera settles down. While the rest of her crew sleeps, she stays awake. Restless. Thinking of how badly she wants to brush Maxwell’s hair behind her ear. 

Thinking about how easily Maxwell could unwind her if she really wanted to.

Thinking of how smitten Hera is for her.

God, she wants to dance with her.

**Author's Note:**

> [for your listening pleasure](https://youtu.be/t3bjPGUDl1k)


End file.
